Eclecticism Intact After a 17-Year Interlude

Mazzy Star was a throwback to a throwback when it performed at Terminal 5 on Wednesday night, touring behind its first album in 17 years. When the band emerged in 1990, its singer and lyricist, Hope Sandoval, and its guitarist and composer, David Roback, wrote songs that looked back to the 1960s, using selective memories of folk-rock and psychedelia to define its own sparse, pensive songs. Now — when newer bands from Beach House to the xx have also embraced the still-waters-run-deep aesthetic — Mazzy Star harks back to its earlier self.

The band may well be a little more self-conscious now about its own influence. “In the Kingdom,” from the new album “Seasons of Your Day” (Rhymes of an Hour), mentions “listening to a band play a song that changed me.” But Mazzy Star had a tightly defined musical strategy from the start.

The three albums Mazzy Star released in the 1990s used the strumming and picking of folk-rock, the basic chords and drones of garage-rock, and a finely calibrated vocabulary of reverb and guitar effects in songs that never move faster than medium tempo and often stay much slower. In a voice that’s both transparent and reserved, Ms. Sandoval sang about separations, regrets and intimations of mortality. “Everybody seems so far away from me/Everybody just wants to be free,” she sang in Wednesday night’s opening song, “Look On Down From the Bridge.”

For the length of its set on Wednesday night, Mazzy Star managed to suspend time in all but one aspect. Despite the efforts of the club’s security staff, the band couldn’t entirely prevent the use of cellphones, prompting Ms. Sandoval to break her onstage reticence to complain about “those jackass flash phones you all have.” The band performed in dim light, with members’ faces in shadow; a video screen showed starscapes, rippling coastal waters or old stereoscope images. There was just enough visual information to keep the focus on the songs.

And the songs arrived with calm deliberation: austere, unhurried, decisively impassive. The set transpired in wavelets, working from gently strummed songs toward more electric drones and quieting down again. The music nearly silenced the big room for the delicate picking and desolation of “Into Dust”; roiled and smoldered with jazz undercurrents in the Doors-style “She Hangs Brightly” and “So Tonight That I Might See”; and brought a calm Velvet Underground swagger to “Blue Flower” and balanced urgent strumming and whispery yearning in “California,” a song from the new album.

Pedal steel guitar hovered over the folk-rock of “Disappear,” as Ms. Sandoval sang, “I’ll never be what you want me to be/No, I can’t disappear.” But she was exactly what Mazzy Star fans have wanted her to be: back and unchanged. Mazzy Star has applied the hovering, meditative stasis of its music to its career.